evenko presents
COLIN JAMES
April 18 - Confederation Centre of the Arts - Charlottetown 7:30pm
Tickets on sale this Friday, September 28 at10am
With his 19th album, Miles to Go, released on Sept. 21, James is getting back to the
blues.
Wait a minute, you ask: hasn’t Colin James always played the blues? Well, yes, but
back when he was signed to his first record deal in 1988, his producer - who worked with
Ray Charles and Derek and the Dominoes - explicitly told him not to play any blues,
because the label expected a pop hit. When James later made one of the biggest
albums of his career - 1993’s Colin James and the Little Big Band, released years before
the so-called “swing revival” - his label hated it, as did critics and many fans before it
went on to go triple platinum in Canada. Then there was the acoustic blues album
National Steel in 1997, made with Colin Linden, which was the first time James made a
full-on blues album, which landed him on folk festival bills alongside the likes of John
Prine and John Hiatt. It was an explicit embrace of the blues James had loved since the
Regina-born guitarist was 16 years old and was blown away by James Cotton at the
Winnipeg Folk Festival. A song that Cotton played that night, “One More Mile,” became
the title track to the new album: bookending it in electric and acoustic versions.
It wasn’t until 2016’s Blue Highways that James found himself on a blues chart: the
album spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on the Roots Music Report’s Blues Chart. It also landed
him one of his biggest hits: “Riding in the Moonlight,” a Willie Dixon song that James
once covered when busking in the streets and subways of Toronto and Montreal, landed
on a Spotify playlist and garnered millions of streams.
When James set out to make Blue Highways, an album of blues covers recorded with
his touring band, he always intended it to be the first of two installments. Now we have
Miles to Go, in which James records nine new covers of his favourite artists (Howlin’
Wolf, Muddy Waters, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Little Willie John,
Robert Johnson, etc.) and adds two originals, “I Will Remain” and “40 Light Years.”
“Blues has always been a pass-it-forward kind of thing,” says James. “It’s also
surprisingly hard to write.
Tickets range in price from $45.00 to $65.00 (including tax
and applicable surcharge) and will be available at the Confederation Theatre Box Office
(145 Richmond St.), by phone at (902) 628-1864 / 1-800-565-0278 and online
at confederationcentre.com and evenko.ca.